I am a professor in Multimodal Learning at the North-West University (NWU), South Africa and I hold the UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources. I obtained my PhD in 2011 in which I researched the accommodation and promotion of multilingualism in schools through blended learning. Before I joined the NWU as lecturer in 2010, I was involved in teaching information technology and languages in schools in the United Kingdom and in South Africa. From 2010 to 2015 I was a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts of the NWU after being appointed as associate professor in the Faculty of Education in 2015. During 2012 I was a guest lecturer at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. In 2018 I was promoted to full professor at the NWU. In 2018 I received the Emerging Researcher Medal from the Education Association of South Africa and I am a rated researcher by the South African National Research Foundation. My research, located within the NWU’s Research Unit for Self-directed Learning, is focused on self-directed learning, multimodal learning, open educational resources, multiliteracies, individualized and contextualized blended learning, e-learning in language classrooms and online multilingualism. As an activist for openness in education I am an active member of the Creative Commons Chapter of South Africa and I lead the newly established Network of OER and Multimodal Self-Directed Learning in Southern Africa (NOMSA).